Academic Misconduct.

To all you students. Your TA knows when you are cheating, copying off old labs, copying off friends, and peaking at your neighbors exam. It is extremely obvious. You will never have a good job reference from this TA and if you see them across from you at the interview table you will be wasting your time because they WILL remember you.

In a perfect world. But with today's system, it is most definetly about grades. Sad people are so lazy today though that they can't put in their own work toward an education they are paying thousands for.

No I am a University instructor and the blatant dis-regard for integrity is mind blowing among 15-20% of the student body. Unfortunately it seems to be a cultural difference. You wouldn't even believe some of the stories I have.

PoLaRpEaKNo I am a University instructor and the blatant dis-regard for integrity is mind blowing among 15-20% of the student body. Unfortunately it seems to be a cultural difference. You wouldn't even believe some of the stories I have.

PoLaRpEaKNo I am a University instructor and the blatant dis-regard for integrity is mind blowing among 15-20% of the student body. Unfortunately it seems to be a cultural difference. You wouldn't even believe some of the stories I have.

I did a chemistry degree. (I still do a chemistry degree, just now I'm a PG.)

We had to run our NMR spectra of molecules we made (it's basically a way of identifying what you've made. It comes out as a graph mapping signal response (y axis) to frequency (x axis) (kind of, that's a massive simplification)), and I lost mine this one week.

I was fucking pissed with myself, but then I came up with a cunning plan.

Our labs were staggered, because the whole of our year couldn't fit into any one lab. So I went to the draw were our scripts are put after marking, and found one that hadn't been picked up yet. It was pretty shit, had more of the markers annotations than his own work, somehow he managed a D+. I took it to the library, scanned in his spectra, photo-shopped out all the annotations and pretty much redrew them on accounting for all the markers corrections.

I picked up the script a week later. I scored an A, and I turned to the NMR spectra. All it said was 10, ie perfect marks for that question.

All was well, until the next lab. A TA came up to me and said something like 'you're pretty good at annotating NMR spectra, aren't you. Almost as good as me', then walked away leaving me looking stunned.

Moral of the story: TA's always know. Good TA's let you get away with it.

cool_nameYa but your second job depends on your first job, which depends on grades

so grades clearly do matter

Your first job doesn't even fully depend on grades. Companies tend to use GPA as a filter by which to narrow the field of candidates to interview (e.g. "must have a least 3.X GPA to apply). After that, it comes down to how well you sell yourself in the interview. I worked in a competitive field and even then the top companies didn't give a shit about grades as long as they were high enough to qualify for an interview: 3.5 (which, let's face it, is unremarkable).

After your first job, your track record of learning new skills, generating value as an employee, and above all being able to convince them that you're a pleasant person to be around for 40+ hours a week are what matter most.

From what I've observed, a lot of the time when people don't get job offers they shift the burden of blame to something external like their GPA or the other candidate having "connections," when usually the reason they didn't get hired is because they lack communication skills.

Even if grades did somehow wholly determine your first job, at what point do you reasonably assign the proximate cause of your career path? Why stop at GPA? How about that time your shoes came untied and you missed the bus and arrived at your midterm 15 minutes late and didn't finish the last 2 questions and got a C+ and damaged your GPA? Uh, blame the shoes? See how ridiculous this is?

lIllIYour first job doesn't even fully depend on grades. Companies tend to use GPA as a filter by which to narrow the field of candidates to interview (e.g. "must have a least 3.X GPA to apply). After that, it comes down to how well you sell yourself in the interview. I worked in a competitive field and even then the top companies didn't give a shit about grades as long as they were high enough to qualify for an interview: 3.5 (which, let's face it, is unremarkable).

After your first job, your track record of learning new skills, generating value as an employee, and above all being able to convince them that you're a pleasant person to be around for 40+ hours a week are what matter most.

From what I've observed, a lot of the time when people don't get job offers they shift the burden of blame to something external like their GPA or the other candidate having "connections," when usually the reason they didn't get hired is because they lack communication skills.

Even if grades did somehow wholly determine your first job, at what point do you reasonably assign the proximate cause of your career path? Why stop at GPA? How about that time your shoes came untied and you missed the bus and arrived at your midterm 15 minutes late and didn't finish the last 2 questions and got a C+ and damaged your GPA? Uh, blame the shoes? See how ridiculous this is?

I never said they are the single detriment, just that they do matter. I stopped reading after the first sentence of your post. Please learn basic reading comprehension

"It's about learning not grades." Okay I see what you're trying to say and I respect it because it is the right mentality but at the end of the day, if you don't get good grades, you don't go to college, if you don't go to college you are put way behind in finding a career unless you planned on not going to college. People are smart in different ways and the fact that your future is based of A, B, C, D, and F scares me.

PoLaRpEaKNo I am a University instructor and the blatant dis-regard for integrity is mind blowing among 15-20% of the student body. Unfortunately it seems to be a cultural difference. You wouldn't even believe some of the stories I have.

so you just let that shit slide and fuck them over later? Isn't that opposing to ethics and exactly what you just said pretty much.

I TAed in grad school and am a university instructor now. It's almost an insult how stupid kids must think I am. I always know when they're cheating. You'd also be surprised how many of the same blatantly wrong answers I get on exams. Hmm....

When I see kids cheating during exams I usually just say something along the lines of "better keep your eyes to yourself... I know who you are," while looking at whatever I'm reading. Then I'll be a little tougher when grading the kids exam that was cheating.